Someday I'll Write a Book about Cider Apples

I went to a cider tasting workshop on Friday night.  We learned about what to look for when tasting a cider: the balance between acidity, sweetness, tannins, and alcohol.  We learned a little bit about the process of making cider, and then we learned some history.  And now I'm obsessed with the history of cider.

So cider comes from one specific kind of apple: the cider apple.  Cider apples are bitter and dry and basically inedible.   You can't really use them for anything other than making cider.  When prohibition hit the US, the vineyards could all continue to make grape juice.  The beer brewers could still use all their barley fields.  But there was nothing the cider makers could do with their cider apples.  The only choice they had (besides keeping an orchard full of useless cider apples that they couldn't sell) was to rip out the trees and replace them with (usually) culinary apples.

When prohibition was lifted, the vineyards and brewers got back in business, but the cider makers had no apples.  Cider in the US has never recovered.  The few cider makers in the US were mostly hobbyists, who started experimenting with culinary apples.  They combined different apple varietals of culinary apple with crab apples, which are tiny little apples that are too tart to eat raw.  Eventually, they developed what's called New World cider, which through sheer ingenuity manages to make a fun refreshing cider without the use of cider apples.  It also means that American cider has a foundation and ongoing history of experimentation that you don't feel as much in beer or wine making.  It embraces Americana ideals of innovation and preserveering through rough times.

They still use cider apples in England and France, and you can taste the difference if you try them.  They have complex tastes, and sometimes they're left to age just like wine, so they have the vintage stamped on the label.  How fancy!  They're much more like wine than New World cider, which I think of more like fun time apple juice that comes in a can.

There's a story in here.  There's a story about having to rip your life's work out of the ground because of a declaration from the powers that be that you're no longer allowed to do that work.  There's a story in here about trying to rebuild from culinary apples.  There's a setting of an apple orchard and a chronic tension.  It's not enough to carry a whole story, but it's enough to be the set up for a story.  Even though I'm overwhelmed with how much I need to get done and how many projects I already have going, I've spent the last several days overlaying story ideas onto this and seeing if I can get anything to fit.